Allusion and Delusion

Woody Allen’s films often appeal to the worst instincts of the very people many of his best films are about—those of us with what used to be known as a liberal arts education who are able to recognise allusions to writers, artists and movies. Indeed half the fun of films such as Annie Hall is watching the characters discuss art and literature. It goes further. If the movie reminds you of say, Ingmar Bergman, as Interiors certainly does, it is sure to be deliberate, with the director knowingly providing material for post-screening foyer discussions among film buffs. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this. Artists influence other artists and these days it is a relief to listen to literate dialogue; and pointing out the references to one’s friends can be enjoyable if, perhaps, a little pretentious.

Which brings us to Allen’s latest, and reportedly most successful film financially, Midnight in Paris, which seems to be all about recognising allusions to literary and artistic figures from the so-called Lost Generation in 1920s Paris. Gil (Owen Wilson), a successful Hollywood screenwriter, is in Paris with his very beautiful fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) along with her wealthy and very conservative parents (Mimi Kennedy and Kurt Fuller). They cannot understand Gil’s romantic love of the city or his struggle to write a novel; and as for staying in Paris, Inez tells him, “I couldn’t think of living anywhere but in the United States.” This is familiar territory for Allen. There are sideswipes at George W. Bush, the “rat hole of the Iraq war”, and the Tea Party (“zombie crypto fascists”) and of course Gil’s prospective in-laws know the price of everything and the value of nothing—“cheap is cheap”.

By chance they meet Inez’s former lecturer Paul (Michael Sheen), an “intellectual” who visits Rodin’s The Thinker and “corrects the guide” (played in a nice in-joke by Carla Bruni, wife of the current French President), then with great authority and little insight proceeds to reel off a series of clichés about art and architecture. Gil finds him insufferable and that evening, rather than go dancing with Paul and Inez, he wanders off. At the stroke of midnight a vintage car pulls up and a group of champagne-drinking revellers invite him to join them. Gil has been transported back to 1920s Paris.

Allen treats Gil’s encounters with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald (Alison Pill and Tom Hiddleston), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) playfully but with great respect. Hemingway finds everything “fine” and talks about “grace under pressure”. Zelda is beautiful but disturbed. She fights with Hemingway while Scott tries to keep the peace. Gertrude Stein critiques Gil’s novel and introduces him to Pablo Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo) and his mistress Adriana (Marion Cotillard). Knowing viewers may or may not recognise portrayals of Josephine Baker, Cole Porter, Man Ray, Luis Bunuel and T.S. Eliot, with Gil quoting the famous line from “Prufrock” about a life measured in coffee spoons.

This is more than a playful game of spotting the next famous artist from the 1920s. Allen has a serious point to make about nostalgia and creativity. Adriana is fascinated by the Belle Époque. After she and Gil are transported, via a slightly sinister coach, back to Maxim’s and the Moulin Rouge of the 1890s and encounter Toulouse Lautrec, Degas and Gauguin, he decides to return to the present. Adriana, however, elects to stay in the 1890s. It is one of those bitter-sweet moments Allen has always done so well. By now Gil and Adriana are in love and Adriana is so well written and played that we want these two likeable characters to get together. But as Gil explains, the present is always imperfect because it is constantly evolving which is why, after getting some more good advice about his book from Gertrude Stein, he returns to the present. Here Gil represents Allen himself. A profoundly traditional artist, Allen clearly believes the achievements of the past enrich our life and work but we must still create something original from this material. Gil doesn’t abandon nostalgia. He rejects his shallow fiancée and decides to stay in Paris “for a time”, and since this is a romance Gil finds a kindred spirit in Gabrielle (Lea Seydoux), the impossibly beautiful girl he has met in a record shop, who shares his love of Cole Porter’s music. But this is because the city is the source of his inspiration and, perhaps, a refuge from the materialism of contemporary America as represented by Inez’s parents.

For all this the film is impossibly romantic. Exquisitely photographed by Darius Khondji and Johanne Debas in locations that include John XXIII Square near Notre Dame, Montmartre, Sacre Coeur and on the Ile de la Cité, the film is a Valentine to Paris. Allen’s style here is emphatically traditional with long takes and extended mid-shots where the viewer’s eyes are free to savour the interactions between the characters. Performances are uniformly “fine”. Owen Wilson is the best substitute for Allen himself since Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity, and Marion Cotillard is arguably his most appealing heroine since Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo. 

White Irish Drinkers is a very different work from Midnight in Paris, but in its own way it is also about the nature of creativity. Writer-director John Gray draws on his own life growing up in Brooklyn in the mid-1970s, when he was longing to be a film-maker, to create a portrait of a blue-collar family that we can hope for the director’s sake is at least partly fictional. There may be a touch of D.H. Lawrence’s Morel family from Sons and Lovers in the film’s portrayal of the Leary family with Patrick (Stephen Lang) the brutal alcoholic father, who rows with his wife, Margaret (Karen Allen), while their sons Danny (Geoffrey Wigdor) and Brian (Nick Thurston) rate the fights on a scale of one to ten in intensity. Most of the brothers’ friends aspire to be nothing more than sanitation workers or bus drivers. In the words of the description from the official site, “They all yearn for the culturally approved 9 to 5 civil service jobs that will carry them through the weekends of beer into lazy retirement.” One of their most likeable friends says, “We are white Irish drinkers! We don’t do pills, we don’t do weed, we don’t do needles; we drink … that is what we do!”

Danny, the elder brother, wants to get out, and the only way he can see is through petty and maybe not so petty crime. (He gets his brother to hide a gun.) Brian, who works part-time in the local cinema, does have a way out. He has been accepted for a college Fine Arts course and secretly paints in the cellar of their apartment building. Ironically, as he tells his would-be girlfriend, Shauna (Leslie Murphy), he likes the place. We also see from his paintings that Brooklyn provides him with his subject matter.

In the best tradition of American realistic drama the film follows Brian’s coming of age as he comes to understand his quarrelsome brother and even the pain beneath his father’s brutality. Gray has a good ear for the rhythms of Irish-American speech and together with the foul language—in one early sequence just about every line begins with an expletive—there is also the wit. 

Shauna: You’re not going to ask to draw me naked are you?
Brian: No, I always wear clothes when I draw. 

Brian: Where’s Pop?
Margaret: Where do you think he is?
Brian: I don’t know, maybe at a parenting seminar. 

These lines work so well because Brian is not made impossibly clever, only believably intelligent. Gray is equally good at portraying the violence that is part of the love–hate relationship between the brothers. It is not that we see that much; the confrontations have the impact they do because they are played with such emotional truth by Thurston and Wigdor. Karen Allen is splendid as the caring but initially uncomprehending Margaret, while Stephen Lang is electrifying as the father. The man is a monster of alcoholic rage and sentimentality. But such is the quality of the writing and playing that when he ultimately gets his richly deserved comeuppance we don’t forget his humanity.

Cinematographer Seamus Tierney uses mobile cameras, tight close shots and, in the night sequences, low light levels, all making the action more immediate and confronting. Many scenes seem to have been played in full with the operator capturing the action as it unfolded in the style of cinema verité where the film-makers are recording real events. This may have been the only way the film could have been completed on budget. Reportedly they had only enough money for a three-week shoot. Still all this has been achieved at the cost of some visual incoherence and I miss the precision the great cinematographer Boris Kaufman’s more formal groupings brought to similar material when he collaborated with Elia Kazan for On the Waterfront and Sidney Lumet in Twelve Angry Men and The Pawnbroker. He was of course shooting in black and white (almost unknown these days); and like Tierney, in the case of On the Waterfront and The Pawnbroker, on real locations. These classics all include extraordinary performances, with the action covered in carefully composed long takes. Moreover the drama in these films was as confronting as that of White Irish Drinkers even though to John Gray’s credit the writing of the latter film is as good as what Budd Schulberg, Martin Fine and David Friedkin did for Kazan and Lumet fifty years ago. Perhaps vital and exciting contemporary directors like John Gray will be inspired by Woody Allen to employ the crisp visual clarity of old masters of cinema such as Kaufman to enrich their own work.

Neil McDonald writes: At the time of writing, Midnight in Paris was in general release throughout Australia. Both it and White Irish Drinkers are available on DVD from the USA.